President-elect Donald J. Trump rounded out his cabinet selections on Saturday, picking Brooke Rollins as his agriculture secretary.
A lawyer from Texas, Ms. Rollins, 52, served in the White House during Mr. Trump’s first term and has spent more than two decades promoting conservative policies as the leader of influential think tanks.
Here’s what to know about her.
She is a veteran of Texas’ conservative movement.
Ms. Rollins’s conservative bona fides run deep. A 2012 profile of Ms. Rollins — who grew up in Glen Rose, Texas, southwest of Fort Worth, and participated in the youth agriculture programs FFA and Four-H — noted that her “commitment to conservative principles began when she was 8 years old, watching, transfixed, as Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in 1980.”
Ms. Rollins graduated from Texas A&M University and worked for Gov. Rick Perry, according to a biography from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank. She joined the think tank in 2003 as its president and chief executive, leading it for 15 years.
During her tenure at the think tank, she wrote opinion columns decrying “free-spending lawmakers and irresponsible choices,” urging the state to resist federal overreach and expressing support for school choice.
She was named one of Texas’ most powerful 25 people by Texas Monthly in 2011, and her think tank was once labeled the “most influential” in the state by The Texas Observer.
She played a role in the Trump administration’s criminal justice reform efforts.
In 2018, Ms. Rollins joined the White House as assistant to the president in the Office of American Innovation. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, who was senior adviser at the time, said upon her selection that he had worked closely with Ms. Rollins on prison reform, which the Texas Public Policy Foundation also supported.
When Mr. Trump endorsed the First Step Act, a revision to sentencing and prison laws, in 2018, he noted that Texas had passed criminal justice reform.
After the bill became law, Ms. Rollins called it “a transformational effort to change our criminal justice system at the federal level, following what many of the red states around the country have been doing for about a decade, including my Texas.”
She directed policy in the White House.
Mr. Trump named Ms. Rollins his acting director of the Domestic Policy Council, which oversees the president’s domestic agenda, just days before protests over the police killing of George Floyd roiled the nation in 2020. At the time, Ms. Rollins said that Mr. Trump was “laser-focused” on safety and security and that the White House was working on a list of solutions to unify the country.
In that role, Ms. Rollins conducted interviews with the news media and appeared in official White House videos to explain and promote Mr. Trump’s policies.
As Mr. Trump sought re-election, Ms. Rollins assured a Catholic news service that Mr. Trump was committed to “pro-life policies for the sanctity of life, for protecting religious freedom.”
She founded a pro-Trump think tank.
After Mr. Trump left the White House, in 2021, Ms. Rollins, along with other Trump loyalists, started the America First Policy Institute; she served as its chief executive.
Staffed by some Trump administration veterans, the institute, a conservative think tank, is likely to be incredibly influential in Mr. Trump’s second term. The group’s transition project, a rival to the more famous Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation, includes nearly 300 drafts of executive orders waiting for Mr. Trump’s signature.
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